I sold one book at the Cambridge (Ohio) Main Street Fall Festival today.
This might not seem like much to a person who doesn’t write books, but given the circumstances, it actually was quite impressive.
Let me to tell you a little story about some of the perils of publishing, particularly when you try to hawk your books like a miniature Barnes and Noble at fairs, festivals, picnics and bar-b-ques:
For starters, it was spitting rain in Cambridge today. If you have ever gone to an outdoor street fair when it was raining, that was probably your last one. Walking in the rain can be cathartic, but shopping in it can be drudgery. Browsers seem unwilling to browse even if the rain is just an annoying drizzle, which is all it was until the more substantial stuff starting falling like little daggers around 2:15 p.m.
But at least I had a tent, or I thought I did. The very nice lady from Cambridge who was excited about one of my books and first invited me to the Fall Fair almost a year ago – and I want to emphasize that she is one of the most cheerful and nicest people I’ve ever met – told me several times that I would I have a tent over me in case it rained, so that the books I was selling and signing wouldn’t get wet.
That didn’t seem too important early in the week, when Ohio was locked in a drought that was threatening to turn the state into the Ohio Desert, but when I arrived in Cambridge and the forecast called for rain, her words sent a shudder up my spine:
“You’re not going to have a tent now,” she said. “The director needed it for some children’s activities, so we had to move you. The place where you were would have been out in the open, so we’ve got you in an alcove where you’ll have some cover.”
Alcove? Uh, OK. I’ve never tried to sell books out of an alcove. But hey, this might be the best thing that ever happened to me, a new wrinkle to book-selling. Stop by my alcove near Hoover Reservoir and buy some books! And next week, I’ll be at an alcove Hocking Hills! I mean, this should be perfect. What could go wrong?
Well, the rain, for one thing. The nice lady found me a small foldup metal table in the Guernsey County administrative building where she works, but the spitting rain was a problem. Whenever it so much as sprinkled, I had to pull the table with my books back into the alcove, which was a large doorway with a few feet of cover. Because the vendors on both sides of me had tents, the few browsers that were out there were walking closer to the street and often didn’t even look in my direction. (Wait, what’s that guy doing back there in that old doorway! Call the police!)
For the first hour and a half I was there, I had no browsers and one interesting conversation about the creative process with a guy who has written a few plays. Other than that, all I got were a four or five smiles, a few nods and two hellos from several feet away. When the sky would stop spitting at me, I would move the table out of the alcove and a few feet closer the traffic, but those moves were always temporary. Move closer to the walkers and risk ruining my books with rain splotches or recede back to the relative safety of my alcove? Given the slim likelihood of book sales when it seemed clear that the small crowd was probably here for jewelry anyway, the choice seemed like a no brainer.
So, I was pleased when a woman with binoculars spotted my books from her path near the street (OK, I didn’t actually see her binoculars), sized up Road to Wapatomica, A modern search for the Old Northwest as something her husband would like, and bought it. At that point, that seemed like bigger upset than Buster Douglas over Mike Tyson.
Although the real rain started falling a few minutes after that, I discovered something else to smile about. As I looked at the doors on the back of my alcove, I remembered that my playwright buddy had told me the entrance to an old theater that became the Cambridge Performance Arts Center, lay just to my right. On closer look at the two old wooden doorways that would have opened into one giant doorway, my alcove suddenly looked like a way for patrons to exit the old playhouse, which I learned had been the Strand Theatre.
Some quick research on the web told me the story:
The first theater on the site opened as the Avenue Theatre on January 23, 1907, and became the Orpheum Theatre in October of that year. It was a Vaudeville house until it closed in 1915 and was torn down, and the Strand was built in its place.
The Strand opened the day before Thanksgiving in 1915 with a movie entitled Graustark, starring Beverly Bane, Francis X, Bushmane and Edna Mayo, and it continued in operation until closed by its owners in 1958. The building became the Cambridge Performing Arts Center in 1977.
As annoying as this little alcove had seemed for most of my time there, it looked different to me when I imagined the people streaming through that door after watching a black and white silent picture called Graustark the day before Thanksgiving in 1915.
When I returned my table and chair to the administration building in the rain – “before the building closes at five minutes until three” as had been requested – I looked over at my little “alcove” in the old theater building and smiled.
Maybe this hadn’t been a bad day after all.
